Dan Snow's History Hit - The Rise of Oliver Cromwell

Episode Date: August 17, 2021

Oliver Cromwell is the only English commoner to become head of state and is one of the most remarkable and controversial figures in history. Energised by his Puritan beliefs he came to dominate the movement to remove Charles I and would come to be Lord Protector ruling the British Isles from 1653 until his death in 1658. As a military commander, he was a natural leader but also absolutely ruthless. Without formal military training before the Civil War, became arguably the best cavalry commander of his generation. His conquest and pacification of Wales, Scotland and Ireland, in particular, was brutal and remains controversial. Professor Ronald Hutton from Bristol University is Dan's guest on today's episode of the podcast. Ronald has recently published The Making of Oliver Cromwell making him the perfect person to give us an insight into this complicated and impressive figure.

Welcome to Dan Snow's History Inn. Today we have such a fluent historian on the podcast. I've been looking forward to getting him for ages. He's Professor Ronald Hutton. He's at the University of Bristol. He's a bit of a legend there. He's a legend to everyone who knows him. He has just written a gigantic book on the making of Oliver Cromwell. Oliver Cromwell, let's be clear about this, he's the only commoner, the only commoner ever to become head of state of what, well, let's loosely call Britain, certainly England and Scotland. He's the only person in the history of the world to ever conquer by force of arms England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland. Edward I has a decent-ish claim, but he never quite finished

the job. And so Oliver Cromwell is truly one of the most remarkable, one of the most controversial figures in British history. Infamous now for the crimes he committed during his invasion, pacification, conquest of Ireland. And that's not all he's infamous for he is an absolutely fascinating figure and Ronald Hutton does him justice in this podcast this is a bit of a tour de force you can enjoy it if you wish to hear the podcast in which I discuss Oliver Cromwell's treatment of his prisoners the prisoners he captured during his conquest of Scotland and kept in Durham Cathedral you just use it as a huge prison you can still see the urine stains on the floor the only place you can do that is by becoming a subscriber to History Hit. You go to historyhit.tv,

you take out a little subscription, it's 30 days free when you sign up, so what's not to like? You get the Netflix of history for free, the award-nominated History Hit TV. Very cool, very much enjoying saying that. You search for Durham Cathedral and you can hear my interview with the archaeologists who dug up the floor of the precinct and found a giant number of Scottish prisoners of war who had died of various ailments and mistreatment and malnutrition under Oliver Cromwell. There's all sorts of other Cromwell-related content, including interviews with Paul Ley about Cromwell. So it's all there. It's all at History Hit TV. All of your history needs under one roof. Go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Join. There are tens of thousands

of subscribers we've got. It's a revolution over there, folks. It's very exciting. It's cool to be part of. In the meantime, this is Professor Ronald Hutton on Cromwell. Enjoy. Ronald, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you. I'm delighted to be on it now. Do you know what I always think to myself? I often look out the window and I think in every generation, there is a Bonaparte, there is a Cromwell. And in most generations, there is a Cortez,

but they just become middle managers at photocopying companies and pub landlords. And no one ever realizes that they're one of the greatest military and political geniuses of all time. Unless the times, the tumult throws them to the fore. Isn't that the most extraordinary thing about Cromwell? Yes, absolutely right. And that's why I'm so glad we don't have more Cromwells and owner parts. Because as you've said, in order to get them, society has to become very dysfunctional indeed. If anyone's listening who thinks they're a Cromwell you may well be but I'm glad in a way that you have an opportunity to demonstrate that. We hear that he's vaguely related to the famous

now particularly famous Cromwell thanks to Louis Mantel of the 16th century. What's his lineage like? What's his family? Would he have aspired to high office even under the monarchy? family, would he have aspired to high office even under the monarchy? Absolutely not in his own origins. Nature designed him to be a minor gentleman living happily for his entire life in the county town of Huntingdon, which with all due credit to Huntingdon, was just a regular, pretty small provincial local county. And what was politics like? How soon does he enter the tumult of the constitutional arguments of the 1630s? He is there in the 1620s. He gets elected to parliament as a Huntingdon MP. It's part of being a big fish in a very small Huntingdonshire pond. And he makes one speech, nobody takes more notice of him, and then he goes home for over 10 years. And suddenly

he emerges onto the national scene like a thunderbolt in 1640, when Charles I calls the long parliament, which turns round and proceeds to tear his government pieces forever. And Cromwell's in the forefront of those wielding the crowbars on the constitutional demolition job. But does that come as a surprise, this otherwise anonymous man? I mean, where does that energy and that drive come from? It comes from a mixture of traumatic personal loss about 10 years before, coupled with spiritual rebirth. The personal loss was that he was punching above his weight in Huntingdon because he had a rich uncle. But rich uncle went bust and moved away leaving young Ollie vulnerable and the town turned on him and threw him out. He was forced to move as a working tenant farmer to an even smaller place down river as pretty well a ruined man and he got picked up spiritually by converting to red-hot evangelical Protestant Christianity,

what we would call a Puritan, dedicated to purifying the Church of England of ceremonies and bishops and rebuilding it around preaching of the Bible. And some, well, is it appropriate to call it radicalisation, but where do we think that comes from is that an intellectual thing does it come from his straightened circumstances his opposition to Charles I's flirtations with high church Anglicanism what's going on there? We don't really know because his conversion happens in a period in which we have almost no information on him. We can only judge by results, but it looks as if, having lost his entire sense of home and status by being chucked out of the hometown, he is convinced by those who convert him to puritanism that God has trashed him in

order to shake him out of his home and his complacency and build him up again for a great purpose. And he finds supportive new friends in the puritan network. And they do rebuild his political fortunes, because it's almost certainly they who get him elected an MP again for the town of Cambridge, standing on an anti-government platform for radical reform of the church. And it gives him a party, it gives him a network, it gives him political support, and it gives him a clientele once civil war breaks out. And what about his, I mean, he's a tenant farmer, you knew his way around the horse, I suppose, but any military training or reading, at least in his background? Probably some reading, but absolutely no practical experience whatsoever. He hits the ground completely raw to war in the autumn of 1642 and has to learn on the job.

Fortunately, he has a breathing space militarily of about nine months in which to learn before things get serious. And he does it hard and well. He's a natural. He's a Puritan jihadi. He sees the world as divided very simply into God's enemies and God's friends. And guess which side he's on. Is this journey one that other people are taking? I mean, is he an outlier here? Is this very much, is he swimming with the current of 17th century England?

He's swimming the current of a very strong tendency in 17th century England, which is the born-again reformist Puritan lobby. He's on the radical wing of it, but there are quite a few other people there, and he's related to some of them. The family connections come in useful again. But he's much more emotional than most people. He's got a much more visceral sense of Christianity. I mean, pretty well, literally so, in the sense that one of his most famous expressions is, I beseech you in the bowels of Christ, by which he means the fundamental, the emotional heart of real Christianity. He's white-hot in an age in which, though it's more religious than ours, most people are more lukewarm. Just to come back quickly before we start fighting to the long parliament,

with his new moral armour, does he play a more active part in that parliament? And we get famous instances like Charles storming the building. I mean, is he among the leaders at that point of the parliamentary faction? Not exactly among the leaders, but a really useful, established and respected second rank man. A good committee man, a man for carrying messages to the House of Lords, very hardworking, very dependable and utterly committed in particular to the reformation of the church. And he dives in there, attracting attention immediately, quite deliberately. On what's practically day two of the parliament, he attracts everybody's notice by making a very effective and very emotional, tear-stained speech on behalf of a Puritan prisoner of the government. And he gets this man sprung from jail. He becomes one of the great extreme radical zealots of the 1640s, and a hero of modern socialist, freeborn John, John Lillman.

So immediately Cromwell is not just firming up his alliance with the radical left of the time, but he's hogging the limelight. And is he somebody who is keen to embrace the military option? I mean, the parliamentary side of it through the 16 late 30s and early 40s seem to be always wrestling with this, how far can they go in their opposition to the king? Does Cromwell suffer from those doubts? Does Cromwell suffer from those doubts? Cromwell suffers from no doubts whatsoever, because being a born-again military puritan fits in with so much of the rest of his character.

It fits in with his exceptional tendency to see the world as divided into the goodies and the baddies, and the baddies as deserving of no mercy whatsoever, especially if they take up arms. It fits in with his zeal to strike a blow, increasingly literally, for his cause. And also, he just loves the excitement of war. He loves the comradeship of having a company and then a regiment. It's his natural environment. He turns out to be very good at it, doesn't he? Is that primarily what it is? Do you think it's that he loves it? He becomes one of the great cavalry commanders in British history. There

must have been something else there. Well, it's brains plus brawn plus viciousness. He's a natural leader of charges. He loves being at the head of a loyal company of well-equipped men. He's very good at logistics. He's good at raising cash ruthlessly to pay his soldiers and to get the best horses, the best weaponry, and the best armor. And so with such a well-turned-out, utterly loyal group who share his religious views and have a personal idealization and idolization of Cromwell himself. They are the tailor-made military machine, and he just leads them into battle from the front and smashes the enemy, usually because they outnumber the enemy, which is part of an abiding characteristic of his military career.

He's incredibly lucky. Well, Napoleon would have approved of him as a general. How does it work? Do you sort of raise private companies? Was he given a budget from Parliament and told to go and recruit men? How do you raise that thirst of war band? He can't afford to raise a war band of his own. thirst of war band? He can't afford to raise a war band of his own. But in the first few months of the year, Parliament's flush with money pumped into it by its rich supporters. And so it gives Cromwell the subsidy to put his company together. And it's then paid out of taxes, leathered by

Parliament of the public. Cromwell is very good at getting to the source, the places where those taxes are paid, so he can help himself to his legitimate proceeds, even when there aren't enough proceeds to go around everybody. We listened to Dan Snow's history hit. We're talking about Cromwell. Simple as that. More after this. Imagine a millennium that laid the foundations for the modern world as we know it today, when kingdoms were forged, languages shaped, cultures created. I'm Dr Kat Jarman, and on Gone Medieval, my co-host Matt Lewis and I will tell you just why the so-called Dark Ages really weren't that dark after all. Subscribe to Gone Medieval by History Hit

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are new episodes every week. And he raises troops from his own home area so he knows them and their reputation is that they're aligned with him in terms of their religious views as well yeah initially his company is raised from his puritan network in the huntingdon, Cambridgeshire area. But as his reputation grows in the next year, young Puritans from all over, from as far as the Birmingham area, come along to join Cromwell's group. And his initial regiment is almost a family concern. His eldest son commands one company, his cousin another, his nephew another. But as it broadens out and it becomes the biggest regiment in the entire Civil War, largely because of Cromwell's sheer ambition, it's drawing on able, zealous Puritan followers from not just over East Anglia, but from London

and Southern England. Is that part of the fiction, or do you think that their elan, their spirit, is helped by their strong religious beliefs? There's no doubt about it whatsoever, because it's a large part of their bond with him. He protects them. An increasing number of them identified with the extreme radical fringe of Puritan religion. People who either believe in a national church, but believe that they should be able to choose their own ministers and maybe worship outside. And if they want to, to those who don't believe there should be a national church at all, that everything should be in call together independent congregations. Now, the majority of Cromwell's parliamentary colleagues, let alone the majority of the English, don't think these people should be allowed to exist. They think they should be persecuted out of existence. And by championing their cause,

think they should be persecuted out of existence. And by championing their cause, Cromwell gets their devoted loyalty and gratitude, and they're all the more willing to fight for him. It really matters. In his first sizable battle at Winspey, a year after the war begins, he has his horse shot under him, and he flies over the head of the dying horse onto his face and is then knocked down by a charging cavalier who raises his sabre to kill him. Now another company would have scattered and saved themselves at that point with a charging enemy wall coming at them and this guy in front about to kill their boss. What happens is Cromwell's men surge forward, kill the Cavalier, surround their boss, get him back on a new horse, and having saved his life, fight back and stabilise the front of the battle.

Now, that is the very highest calibre of military performance from a cavalry regiment. That is remarkable. And he ends up at the Battle of Naseby, I suppose we should talk about, in 1645 is Naseby, and he performs the vital task on the left flank there, I think it is. At what stage does he start to dominate the military and political council of the parliamentary side? It's a step-by-step process. He starts as a captain in 1642. 1643, he's promoted to a colonel and raises this huge regiment. 1644, he's made the second-in-command of the Army of East Anglia,

commanding its cavalry. And he does that with such marked ability and success that in 1645, to the dismay of a lot of the people in Parliament who are quite scared of him by now, he is the only man whom Parliament's pool together, crack army, the new model army, the army raised to finish the Civil War, win it outright, are prepared to have as their cavalry commander. He is just too good to lose. And that's when he becomes one of the great cavalry commanders of English history. He is the equivalent of, say, Jeb Stuart in the American Civil War, Murat in Napoleon's armies, or indeed Prince Rupes the Rhine in the Royalist Army of the Civil War. So even if Cromwell's career had finished with the Great Civil Waritherto, he has a seat in Parliament itself and is a first-rank political figure as well. So he really is made. At the end of the war, Parliament's

intending, when it's got the king to surrender to its terms, to have him made a baron, a lord, with an income of two and a half thousand pounds a year. So he's being raised to the aristocracy from being a minor gent. It's the biggest rags-to-riches story that Parliament intends from its war. Well, it turns out to be a bigger rags-to-riches story because he's the first commoner to become head of state, I don't know, since the middle Anglo-Saxon period. I mean, it's an extraordinary story, isn't it? And actually, interestingly, I was talking to Michael Wood about the history of China the other day,

and I was very struck. In China, these dynasties, you do get these peasant emperors. And in Britain and in Western Europe, it doesn't seem to happen quite as often. Why is it that Cromwell is able to crawl all the way to the top of this greasy pole? is it that Cromwell is able to crawl all the way to the top of this greasy pole? It's just chance that it's the biggest political, religious, constitutional convulsion in our history. And so it's capable of hurling somebody furthest up the social order. Now, a commoner to royalty story like Cromwell's is not unique in European history, let alone that of the world. For example, Bernadotte, Napoleon's marshal, becomes king of Sweden, and his family still rules Sweden to this

day, whereas you don't have a Cromwell in charge of England. But his achievement in English history is unique. I don't even think the Anglo-Saxons dealt in commoners, they dealt in chiefs of war bands, which is the equivalent of aristocracy in their day. So Cromwell is simply, in terms of the scale of achievement, the greatest English commoner of all time. And then the interesting thing about him is he doesn't just become head of state, he becomes the only head of state, arguably Edward I, but the only head of state to actually conquer all of the subsequent constituent parts of the United Kingdom. Because obviously Scotland and England come together in an active union in the 18th century, but Cromwell conquers Scotland, conquers Ireland. And so in a way is one of the most powerful figures in the whole of English history relatively, or British history? He is certainly one of our greatest soldiers, even though he's somebody who never

fought a foreign foe on our behalf. In many ways, his crushing of the Scots, poor things, in 1650-1 was not only the only time that the Scots have ever been comprehensively conquered. Remember, they beat off the Romans, the Vikings, the English, and the Normans, all of whom got England in turn. But they beat off the English once again in the Middle Ages under Edward I. again, in the Middle Ages under Edward I. But Cromwell gets them basically in just over a year. It's a unique and astonishing achievement, though one which most of the other constituent parts of the British Isles would really like to forget. He's infamous in Ireland. He's infamous in Durham, where I just went to look at the extraordinary archaeology in Durham Cathedral, which was deconsecrated and used as a prison for the Scots and maybe the Scots soldiers

that were captured in his campaign. And many died of mistreatment and disease. We could do 5,000 podcasts here. But in Ireland, having defeated the Stuarts in England, he faces a Catholic-Irish uprising, if you like, against that kind of new positive settlement and goes to deal with it himself. Yes, he's facing basically an independence movement, a home rule movement on the part of the majority of the Irish people, which has allied with the defeated English royalists. And it's quite a powerful combination. But Cromwell goes over with basically a steamroller

to face somebody armed with a rake. He's got an enormous army, a gigantic siege train, and the Irish simply cannot face him in battle. So what they do is they shut themselves up in walled towns. But Cromwell's enormous siege train can smash down their walls and take them, and that's what happens. Cromwell does behave quite atrociously once in Ireland at the town of Drogheda, not as atrociously as modern Irish mythology makes. The Irish tourist board, Audiovisual in the 1980s, reproduced what Irish schools had taught in the 20th century, which is he killed every child, woman and man in the place. He didn't. He slaughtered the garrison, which is around 3,000 armed men, and quite a few civilians

got killed as collateral damage, a minority. But that's still an enormous atrocity by the standards of the fighting in the British Isles in the 1640s. And it's his personal responsibility, as he admitted after a week in which he couldn't quite face the task of informing his employers of what he'd done, that in the heat of the moment, he just got carried away because so many of his men had got killed trying to get through the walls. Restraining an army intent on sacking a city has always been one of the most difficult things for any general. Can I answer that? Yeah, go on, yeah. A, he didn't try and restrain them, he egged them on. And B, his command was to kill everybody who'd been in

weapons in the town, which meant that English royalist refugees who had surrendered on the promise of mercy were killed much later on Cromwell's orders because of his directive to massacre the entire garrison. And whereas soldiers will behave badly when they're looting and people are in their way, to kill people who've surrendered on mercy actually is a violation of the laws of war. Okay, so he is guilty of war crimes there. He defeats a couple of royalist attempts in England, young Charles Stuart, who would become Charles II. He defeats him handily. How does he become Lord Protector? How does he actually reach that position of head of state? Simply because he's been carried to power by the revolutionary army

that won the Civil War, and then unable to do a deal with the defeated king, wrecked the constitution in an effort to get at him and remove him. So they removed the monarchy, the House of Lords, and the Episcopal Church of England, the bishops, the cathedrals from the Church of England, and then try and carry out further reforms to get a more regular, more democratic parliamentary system, cheaper and faster justice for people, and a much broader, loosely defined and more tolerant Church of England. Now, these things are going to happen in the 19th century under a constitutional monarchy, but it's all a bit early in the 1640s and 50s, and the army just can't get an elected parliament to agree to the reforms it wants. by putting Cromwell as law protector, a quasi-king figure, with a powerful council instead of a house of lords, to manage, purge and overrule parliaments until they tow the line and produce the army's

second revolution. And they never succeed. It never works. It doesn't work because Cromwell refuses to be their instrument? No, Cromwell's delighted to be their instrument, even though he does try to curry favour with conservatives at times. It's simply because the army won't let go of its dream of a new, a different England. And the English political nation, the gentry, the lawyers, the aristocracy, English political nation, the gentry, the lawyers, the aristocracy, won't accept it. So it's a standoff. And Cromwell, the one final battle he cannot win, is the battle to provide a legitimate settlement. I mean, it's the same with revolutionaries all over the world. It's based on charismatic or military might.

It's very difficult to create something that will outlast you. That's right. But the solution found by later revolutionaries in France, Russia, Cuba and elsewhere is not to trust the people initially. In other words, don't allow them to elect freely assemblies that can then do the people's will. Instead, you have a ruling party which controls the process of election and ensures that it has popular assemblies that rubber stamp what the revolutionary Junto wants. And although that's something I don't believe in myself, in fact, I'd oppose it with all my might. And it's an appalling way to treat a people. In terms of delivery, it actually works. But Cromwell's

soldiers weren't prepared to do that to the people. They were too firmly in belief that in the last analysis, they had to have properly elected assemblies. We've gathered through a lot of history there, Ronald. Thank you so much. For people that want to find out more, what's the book called? It's called The Making of Oliver Cromwell, and it's an absurdly lushly written and carefully described romantic account of Cromwell's rise to power to the end of the Great Civil War in 1646. Well, we've snuck beyond there a little bit, but thank you very much. There's nothing absurd about it.

It's absolutely brilliant. It's lovely and lush. Thank you very much indeed for coming on. Thank you. Bye. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country,

all were gone and finished. Thanks, folks. You've made it to the end of our country, all work on and finish. Thanks, folks. You've made it to the end of our episode. Congratulations. Well done, you. I hope you're not fast asleep. If you did fancy supporting everything we do at History Hit, we'd love it if you would go and wherever you get these pods, give a little rating, five stars or its equivalent. A review would be great. Thank you very much indeed. That really does make a huge difference. It's one of the funny things the algorithm loves to take into account. So please let everyone do that. It can seem like a small thing, but actually it's kind of a big deal for us. I really appreciate it. See you next time.